On Mon, 2 Jan 2006, Len Kranendonk wrote: > I'm running Apache/2.0.54, mod_perl/2.0.1, Perl/v5.8.7 on FreeBSD 6.0. > > Right after starting apache (with preloading the needed perl modules) the > httpd root process is about 40MB. > After several days it has grown to over 100MB.
what would be interesting: how many requests do you have per second? usually it doesn't hurt to set MaxRequestsPerChild to a desired low value. i recently made a memory bench with a self-compiled apache 1.33 that showed that every request (of a mod_perl-handler that just outputs content-type) added a small amount of memory to the child process; i haven't watched the parent process, though. it's also common to regularly restart apache once a day/week/... > I'm using Apache2::SizeLimit to kill of httpd childs that get too large. I'm > using this configuration: > > $Apache2::SizeLimit::MAX_PROCESS_SIZE = 100000; > $Apache2::SizeLimit::MAX_UNSHARED_SIZE = 25000; > > The problem here is that when the Apache parent process gets 100000 KB big, > the spawned childs > also are that size, which means that a spawned child is killed immediately > after it served its first request. > The only way to decrease the parent size is to stop and start apache. > > My understanding is that the parent process is not supposed to serve any > requests itself. > It's entire job is to manage the children. So, how come it is growing, and > more importantly, how can > I control it ? try to figure out what kind of data strucures you're using where. if you have structures that are shared for all childs and you write to them, then this data memory will be copied for all childs and the root process (i think). wherever you can, separate configuration data you don't write to from data you are changing. Devel::Size can help you to find out the sizes of your variables (although a colleague tried it once on his webserver and it didn't show correct sizes, while working on the command line, but it worked for me). if you use Apache::Registry, then preload your scripts in the startup script, so that the code is in "shared memory". this will increase the root process first, but once it's loaded, the child processes don't have to load it again, so the overall memory used will be less. tina -- http://tinita.de/ http://darkdance.net/